Haiku, the open-source BeOS replacement project, turns five years old today. Founded in August 2001 as OpenBeOS with the intention of replacing BeOS due to the lack of action by the then-ailing Be, Haiku has seen five years of change in the BeOS market but continues to progress.

Actually, *all* Id Software games from Wolfenstein 3D, through the original Doom series, through the Quake series, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Doom3, Quake4, Unreal, Unreal Tournament series, Rune, and quite a number of other well known titles have Linux versions. I say Linux *versions* and not *ports*, since, in Id's case at least, the games are written in a portable style. Just plug in a renderer for the OS in question and you have a version (not a port) for it.

Actually, From Quake1 on, all the Id games have gotten official Linux versions supported by Id and released not to long after the Windows version went gold. The original Doom was ported by an Id employee years before the engine went open source, but I can't remember how official that was considered at the time.

Sorry to spend so much time on this point, but it's a common misconception about Linux that I try to address when appropriate. I have not wanted for games under linux since Zoid Kirsch released squake in 1996. And I do tend to go for the high end FPS's.

As to frame rate, I like to play at 1600x1200, 4x gaussian FSAA with a high level of anisotropic filtering, and at high or ultra quality. Even with the latest nvidia drivers on a 6800GT and an AMD64 4000+, I find myself needing a little more oomph to keep the frame rate acceptable. So no, non-optimal drivers would not be good enough.

On package management, I rarely install from random sites. Almost without exception, I find what I need in a well known repo. What is a "dependency problem", btw?

Ruby on Rails, so far as I know, is pure Ruby. Turbogears, so far as I know is pure Python. So I'm hopeful on this one.

On the remote filesystem, an nfsv2 *client* is half the solutution. But how does that fit with other posts here that indicate that Haiku doesn't have tcp/ip right now?

I have been having great fun with Linux, and Unix before it, since 1988. I can believe that Haiku is fun, as well.

And this really brings me to my real message.

Aside from having a genuine, if casual, interest in the current status and capabilities of Haiku, my original response was actually to ronaldst's thread starter:

"""Haiku is the best bet. More "Free" than the other guys. Not stuck in the 70ies. No major security problems. No "OSS fundies" clowns to ruin the fun. APIs are solid. Only good stuff."""

Note how it's not enough to simply praise Haiku. He feels the need to attack other OSes and their users.

Guys, have fun with your OS of choice, whatever it might be. I'm happy for you. But if you feel the need to start gratuitously attacking other OSes and the people who like and use them... don't. Especially when your own favored OS has some substantial housecleaning to do, itself.

Or, to put it more succinctly, people who live in glass houses had best not throw stones.

Going in to this, I really did not know for sure what the answers to my questions would be. But I had a pretty good idea that the answer would be "no" to a good portion of them.

To its credit, Haiku actually did better on them than I was expecting.

> On the remote filesystem, an nfsv2 *client* is half
> the solutution. But how does that fit with other
> posts here that indicate that Haiku doesn't have
> tcp/ip right now?

We had a TCP/IP implementation - it was just done really badly. We're currently in the process of rewriting it, and that's why we don't have one now (there was no point in keeping the old version alive, as we haven't released anything yet).

A NFS client exists for BeOS already, but will have to be ported; a server was also available once, but I don't remember if it was an open source version (but that one could run unchanged, as only the file system API changed).

But NFS is not the primary choice for Haiku, as Haiku without attribute and indexing support is only an inferior solution. So while we have it available for compatibility and data exchange, Haiku will also include its own network file system (which already works on BeOS to some extent, but hasn't been released yet, either).

> Guys, have fun with your OS of choice, whatever it
> might be. I'm happy for you. But if you feel the
> need to start gratuitously attacking other OSes and
> the people who like and use them... don't.

Definitely.

> Especially when your own favored OS has some
> substantial housecleaning to do, itself.

And even if not, there is no reason to do it.
Besides, we haven't even released an alpha version yet; and while you could use Haiku already if you really wanted to, you definitely wouldn't like the experience if you had to live with it today :-)

As an OSS and Linux fan, myself, I can kind of understand what you mean about the "OSS fundies" spoiling the fun. (The more extreme FSers have been getting on my nerves a bit as of late. ;-)

But in what way is the industry "stuck in the 70's"?

There is definitely something to be said for an evolutionary approach, as opposed to a revolutionary one. In fact, it seems to me, based upon what I have read in this thread, that the Haiku developers believe in an evolutionary approach: First achieve r5 compatibility, and then build on that.

At any rate, I've learned more about the state of Haiku than I would have otherwise.